While the South Village is deemed by many as the heart of Greenwich
Village, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this
neighborhood was developed and transformed into an archetypal immigrant
neighborhood from New York’s last great wave of immigration,
and remains remarkably physically intact as such. As home to a thriving
Bohemian community, it was also the birthplace of some of the last
century’s most important and transforming social, cultural
and artistic movements. Many of the area’s most charming and
iconic streets – Bleecker, Carmine, MacDougal, Sullivan, Thompson,
Downing, Cornelia, Jones and Minetta – are found here. In
spite of this, the South Village was left out of the original Greenwich
Village Historic District designation nearly 40 years ago. To right
this wrong, a district of about 38 blocks south and west of Washington
Square Park has been proposed for designation, focusing on the area’s
working-class architecture and immigrant and cultural history. The
area is close to early districts designated in the 1960s and 1970s,
bordering on the Greenwich Village and the Charlton-King-Vandam
Historic Districts with the SoHo-Cast Iron and NoHo Historic Districts
nearby. The MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District is within
the proposed area as well as 11 individual landmarks.

In
the early nineteenth century, large estates were divided and sold
for development creating a residential neighborhood in Greenwich
Village. Although fell of the row houses here were designed by professional
architects, they were built with classically-inspired details of
the Federal and Greek Revival styles. Over 200 of these homes remain
in the South Village and can be found, some still intact, on nearly
every block. Many were converted to commercial and multi-family
use in the mid-nineteenth century, as the largest African-American
community in the city was joined by German, Irish and French immigrants.
By the 1890s, the majority of South Village’s residents were
Italian.

As the years went on, the small row houses could not accommodate
the growing number of residents, and around 1870, purpose-built
tenements were constructed. Their construction continued into the
first years of the twentieth century in various forms based on laws
that sought to make them safer and healthier. The South Village
is one of the city’s rare neighborhoods with well-preserved
pre-law, old law, new law, and reform tenements. Despite originally
containing few if any amenities on the inside, these buildings have
extraordinary details on their exteriors. Window
lintels and sills, cornices, decorative fire escapes, masonry of
varying patterns and color, cast iron, terra-cotta and other details
come together to create Italianate, Neo-Grec, Queen Anne, Romanesque
Revival, Renaissance Revival and Beaux-Arts style tenement buildings.
There are also a number of significant examples of reform housing
including Ernest Flagg’s 1896-1897 Mills House built for working
men.

South Village is also home to many community and
social institutions that served the working-class, immigrant neighborhood.
Catholic churches such as St. Anthony of Padua, built in 1886 (the
first church built for an Italian congregation in the Americas),
and Our Lady of Pompeii, built forty years later, ministered to
primarily Italian-American parishioners. The First Presbyterian
Church built the Bethlehem Chapel and Memorial House in 1918 as
a missionary church and settlement house, while the Greenwich House
settlement established a ceramics studio. The Children’s Aid
Society’s Sullivan Street Industrial School designed by Calvert
Vaux in 1891 is still in use by the Society. A row of buildings
overlooking Hudson Park includes a Carnegie branch of the New York
Public Library, a public bath (now the Tony Dapolito Recreation
center) and the C.B.J. Snyder designed P.S. 95, reflecting the city’s
involvement in the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.

The
South Village was noted in James McCabe’s 1872 Lights and
Shadows of New York Life as “the headquarters of Bohemianism.”
In the opening decades of the 20th century the streets south and
west of Washington Square became nationally famous as the center
of bohemian life and culture attracting artists, writers, political
radicals, gays, lesbians and others seeking to break away from traditional
society. Theaters, galleries, music clubs and bookshops flourished.
This bohemian life attracted others, including young career people
who moved into row houses updated and redesigned with studio windows
and mansard tiled roofs in the nineteen-teens and twenties. This
creative, anti-establishment aura continued with the beat and hippie
cultures of post-WWII. Cafés, an Italian tradition that flourished
in the neighborhood, was popular with these residents too, becoming
a symbol of the overlapping cultures and histories of the South
Village.

The streets of the South Village are lined with
an extraordinary array of row houses, tenements and public buildings
that reflect the area’s architectural and cultural development
and redevelopment from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.
The proposed district has been deemed eligible for the New York
State and National Registers, but the architectural intactness that
makes this neighborhood so notable is at risk. The charm and stability
created by the neighborhood and bordering historic districts has
made the South Village an attractive spot for developers. Buildings
like the Tunnel Garage, an early art deco automobile garage with
distinctive terra cotta ornament, have been recently demolished.
Others such as the famous Circle in the Square Theater have been
altered beyond recognition. Now is the time to designate this neighborhood
of great architectural, historical and cultural significance while
it is still largely intact.